


Frozen, From Concentrate

by aeli_kindara



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1930s Brooklyn, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes in Bucharest, Flashback fic, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), a desert island, an apple a day, the journey to Wakanda, these boys deserve a goddamn day at the beach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-29 02:05:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15062669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: If there's one thing he knows, it's protocols.





	Frozen, From Concentrate

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is loosely connected with my fic [Bird-Naming](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14489367), in that it covers the time between Civil War and Bucky's arrival in Wakanda in a way I view as a precursor to that story. (I view them both as precursors to another, longer story, coming soon!) However, it should stand fine on its own.
> 
> Trigger warning in the end notes.

If there’s one thing he knows, it’s protocols.

That's not what Bucky called them, back then, but long before the Winter Soldier, even before the Army, it’s what they were. Eat your breakfast, kiss mom’s forehead, wash the bowl while she’s not looking. Bag on shoulder, lace your boots crosswise, grab two apples from the tree by the stairway; twist the stems gently so the branch won’t bang a window, down to the sidewalk, look for Steve.

Or: hand on a girl’s hip, smile when she sees you looking. Drop your eyes to her lips but not to her chest, then over her shoulder to check on Steve. Tuck her hair behind her ear, like you’re not sure if you’re allowed to; move to the dancefloor before you kiss her, turn her slowly, check on Steve.

Or sometimes: make your excuses, slip out to the alley. Clean Steve’s cuts for him once the fight is done.

It bothered Bucky, sometimes, that he wasn’t always there to look out for Steve. That his friend went through the scarlet fever that nearly killed him, and the rheumatic fever that nearly killed him, and the ensuing pneumonia that nearly killed him, all alone. And yes, okay, he still had his mother then — but he didn’t have _Bucky,_ and Bucky took that personally all the same.

There was a time, when they first met, that he thought he could fix it. It was what the heroes in stories did; they _fixed_ things, found the cure or saved the princess or stormed the German lines. The two of them didn’t look so different, then — Steve was skinny, yeah, but Bucky hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet either — and Steve didn’t have any fruit trees in his tenement yard. An apple a day, Bucky figured, and there weren’t apples on his tree year round, and sometimes they were wormy, but Steve never seemed to mind.

Later, when they had their own place, Bucky bought them an orange tree to keep inside. He picked it up in Coney Island from a guy with a Texas accent, paid too much for it probably, and Steve laughed himself halfway to an asthma attack when he got home and saw it. It took up most of their tiny apartment’s window-adjacent real estate, as vividly out of place as if it came from the moon, and deliberated for three solid years before it finally produced a grudging crop of two fruits. That only made Steve laugh harder, but he had to admit they were the best fucking oranges he’d ever had.

Bucky wrote him a lot about that orange tree, from basic, and then from Europe. There wasn’t much else to write about, nothing he wanted to tell Steve about anyway, so he asked questions, reminisced over old stories, like the one about how the guy at Coney Island tried to sell him a live armadillo, too, a story he must’ve told fifty times. Steve never called him on it, just assured him he was keeping the tree watered and happy; that it had flowered again, and smelled amazing; that he’d gotten half a dozen oranges this spring, that they were even better than the crop before.

By then the government was buying pretty much all the citrus coming out of Florida, and sending it over to the troops liquefied and canned and tasting mostly of turpentine, with sunny pictures and ads about Vitamin C. It made Bucky quietly, fiercely happy, whenever he choked his way through one of those cans, that Steve still had that tree. When Steve confessed, later, that he’d given all the fruit away to the neighborhood kids, and the tree to the Polish family upstairs when he left, Bucky had started crying, crying and laughing, and Steve had looked stricken for a moment and then joined in, until Falsworth stuck his head in the tent and pointed out that Howling Commandos didn’t have to actually _howl._

_Fuck off,_ Steve had told him, lips curved in a rare, uncomplicated smile, and once Falsworth did, he’d kissed Bucky, fingers on the pulse under his jaw, and Bucky had said, _After this damn thing is over, you’ll be such a fucking war hero they’ll give you your own orange grove. Big ole mansion down in Florida, or California. See if they don’t._ Then, as it occurred to him: _And you’ll STILL manage to give it all away._

_I’ll save enough to share with you,_ Steve had answered, pulling him down, _if you’ll come stay._

That wasn’t protocol. Protocol was: keep your distance, have Steve’s six, give him and Peggy space to figure out their shit together. Only they’d always been bad at protocol, really, both of them, and when Steve smiled at him like that, looked at him like that, curved his thumb around Bucky’s hipbone like that, protocol could honestly get fucked, for all Bucky could find it in him to care.

That’s how it is in Bucharest. It’s Thursday, and there’s a protocol for that: visit the market, pick up a newspaper, stop by one of his dozen or so irregularly rotating cyber cafes. Put in a couple hours’ translation work for strangers on the internet, and thirty minutes of his own research in the online newspaper archives; print out anything important; take it home to tape inside his notebook. Sit with it. Try to remember. Write down anything new.

Most of his first notebook is about Steve. That felt preferable, at the time, to making it about Bucky; a guy he still wasn’t sure he could own. But the cowardice in that choice got harder and harder to ignore, and so after Captain America comes page after page of missions: mysterious deaths, half-remembered tragedies. Dates. Maps. He figured out Siberia about halfway through the second notebook, and the thought of the other soldiers still wakes him up in a cold sweat, sometimes. It’s worse even than his usual nightmares, which at least are of things he knows are in the past.

Lately, though, he’s run out of missions to recover. He’s remembered basically everything, and he’s not sure where that leaves him to go. He’s still got a few pages left, so he’s been filling them in carefully, selectively. Not things about him or Steve, exactly, just — things. Things that feel like they matter, somehow.

Yesterday it was an article about how someone worked out making decent-tasting orange juice from frozen concentrate. It was in the ‘40s, during the war; Bucky must’ve just missed it. He’d sort of like to try it. He sort of prefers the real thing.

They don’t have fresh oranges at the market today, but they do have plums.

The guy he usually buys his newspaper from, on Thursdays, is looking at him oddly. He crosses the street and finds out why.

There’s a protocol for this, too. There’s a backpack under the floorboards, packed and ready to go; there’s escape routes, ways out of the building, the city, the country. He’s been on the run for two years. He knows what he’s doing.

There’s no protocol for slipping into his apartment and finding Captain America already standing there, shield on his arm, Bucky’s notebook open in his hand.

\---

Bucky’s been quiet since Siberia.

At first, Steve didn’t read much into it, outside the obvious. He’s been reeling a little himself, limping off his injuries, wondering if his utter lack of remorse for what he did to Tony is worth a crisis of conscience. He’s more or less decided it isn’t; that Tony will recover, that he’ll rebuild the bridge when he can. Bucky, meanwhile —

Bucky’s down an arm, and while he might’ve said _no_ when Steve asked if it hurt, Steve’s pretty sure that was a lie. It’s not bleeding, at least, and the sparks have stopped fizzling out of it now. Bucky spent the first hour in the jet with a set of fine instruments from the toolkit under the console, snipping and soldering and turning down Steve’s offer of help; now he’s lying on his back on the narrow bunk, apparently sleeping, except that Steve’s switched the jet to autopilot and turned in his chair to watch him and found that Bucky’s eyes are open, gaze on the ceiling above.

“Buck,” he says, as gently as he can.

Bucky doesn’t startle. His eyes slide down to Steve, chin tilting a little to get him in view, and it’s such a familiar gesture, Bucky in bed and Steve at a desk, or his easel in their old Brooklyn apartment, that it punches the air right out of his lungs.

_You gonna sit there forever or come join me, sweetheart,_ he thinks Bucky might drawl, or _well this hurts like a sonofabitch,_ matter-of-fact and somehow hilarious because of it, or _planes don’t fly themselves, Steve,_ except that they do.

Bucky says none of those things. He says nothing at all, just watches Steve with steady, fathomless eyes, and the jet _is_ flying itself, so Steve gets up and goes to him.

He hesitates when he gets there, uncertain, then drops to sit on the floor, where Bucky can see his face. He props his arms on his knees, but Bucky reaches out his right hand, just a little, and Steve takes the invitation to tangle their fingers together. “Buck,” he says again, and Bucky turns his face a bit more, keeping his eyes on Steve. He doesn’t grip Steve’s hand back, exactly, but his fingers twitch slightly, curl Steve’s in toward his palm.

It occurs to Steve suddenly that he’s still wearing his helmet. He reaches with his left hand to remove it, a little clumsily, and it obscures his vision briefly as he slides it off his head. When he blinks again at Bucky, he finds his face crinkled with a smile, a huff of breath escaping him that’s almost a laugh. Then Bucky turns his fingers free, and Steve’s heart sinks for a moment before Bucky’s reaching to smooth his helmet hair, touch gentle and precise behind his ears.

“ _Buck,_ ” he says for a third time, because he can’t say anything else, and Bucky shakes his head, still smiling, and takes Steve’s hand again, tight this time, and draws it up to press Steve’s fingers to his lips.

“You always did fuck with my protocols,” he says, mouth brushing over skin, and Steve doesn’t really know what that means, but Bucky’s still smiling, his eyes are smiling, so he figures it must be good.

\---

He goes to Romania because he knows Romanian, and that seems like as good a reason as any. 

He knows a lot of languages. Thirty, he thinks, though he’s not sure where the number comes from _._ There are easier places to get to, and he does make a stop in Mexico, then Cuba, which stretches on for nearly a month. He likes it there, the classic cars, the kids playing back alley baseball; it feels more like home than twenty-first century America. The whole time, though, his dreams are of voices in Spanish: a mother, a child, begging for their lives.

He doesn’t think he’s murdered any Romanians. Those dreams stop, when he gets there; so do all the others, for a while, though he often wakes in the morning with knots in his back and scabs on his lower lip and no memory of where his mind has been. That freaks him out, briefly, so badly that he handcuffs himself to the bed, but he wakes with a chafed wrist, not a broken shackle, and with time, the conscious dreams return — killing people, screaming in a chair — but not every night.

He scours the newspapers for apartment listings — he’s skeptical, still, of the internet — and finds a proper slumlord to rent from, someone whose tenants are desperate families and undocumented immigrants, people who will never call the authorities or even really look you in the eye. He asks the man if any of his rentals have fruit trees, and the man laughs in his face but says this one is near a market, five minutes’ walk, and Bucky says that one, I’ll take that one.

He covers his windows with newspaper and changes them every two weeks, for variety. He wears a hat low over his eyes.

He gets over his fear of the internet, a little, and finds that people who know thirty languages are in some demand.

\---

The fastest way to the Raft is to follow the great circle, north over the Arctic Ocean. Steve doesn’t take them the fastest way to the Raft.

He flies east, instead, cuts out to sea over Kamchatka and turns south, skirting Japanese airspace under cover of darkness. The sun rises to find them soaring over an endless landscape of clouds, shifting gold-edged valleys and ridges, boiling in slow motion into towers that crumble again before they’ve even left them behind.

They fly south and farther south still, until they leave the clouds behind and the Pacific sparkles below them, an endless, anonymous, wave-textured expanse.

Steve touches them down on a tiny island a thousand miles from anything, little more than a ring of sand breaching the ocean’s surface. From the air, it’s fringed by brilliant, aquamarine coral reefs. Seabirds swirl around them as they settle onto the beach.

He’s long since stripped out of his combat gear, down to his sweaty undershirt, kicked off his boots and rolled his pants up to his calves. It’s how he always used to paint, barefoot with his legs folded in the chair beneath him. It was easier when he was smaller, but the pilot’s seat is roomy, and flying is like painting, in its way; he’s whiled away the last hours imagining how he’d depict the clouds and water, layered abstract splashes of white and gold and blue.

Bucky shadows him silently down the ramp, but stops at its edge when Steve walks barefoot out into the sunlight and sand. “What are we doing here,” he says, voice quiet, as if that could mask the absence of inflection.

Steve turns, slipping his hands into his pockets. “I wanted to stop,” he says.

Bucky looks around carefully, as if assessing the deserted island for traps. “Can’t stop very long,” he says, “without fresh water.”

“Yeah,” says Steve, “still.” His bare toes dig in the sand.

Bucky considers him for a moment, his expression barely visible in the shadow of the plane. Then he drops to one knee and starts unlacing his boots.

He places them on the hard surface of the ramp, socks folded over the tongues, and pads onto the sand like a wary cat. His right arm hovers across his torso as if it to hold a phantom rifle. He keeps turning his head back and forth, like he’s trying to catch a glimpse of something just outside his sight.

Steve watches the line of sun travel diagonally across his body, gleaming off the remnants of his metal shoulder, until he stops. His body is a high-tension wire. His feet are still in shadow. “Steve,” he says, in a strained voice. “You gotta — I don’t — you gotta tell me what to do.”

Steve’s heart turns over like a laboring furnace, thudding in his chest. He keeps his voice cheerful, bracing. “Remember the beach? Rockaway? Redhead named Dot?”

Bucky stares at him for a moment, then nods, slowly.

“Think that shoulder of yours is up for a swim?”

First, Bucky just blinks at him. Then he turns away, moving deliberately, and Steve thinks for a moment he’s fucked it all up, that Bucky’s running back to the cool darkness of the interior of the jet. But Bucky only shrugs out of his combat jacket, carefully, and folds it before placing it beside his boots on the ramp. Next comes his pants, and then his shirt, in a smooth motion over his head.

His bruises from the fight have already faded. There are older scars, though, unfamiliar scars, that Steve wants to smooth his hands over. He swallows against the urge.

When Bucky turns around and sees him looking, for an instant, his face is utterly blank. Then he tilts his chin and lifts his eyebrows, a smirk playing over his mouth, and says, “You gonna stand there staring all day, or are we goin’ swimming?”

Steve just stares at him, disconcerted by the sudden change. Bucky gives a shrug; it looks lopsided with only one arm. He starts toward the water, muscles shifting smoothly under his skin. There’s a saunter in his step, and Steve can’t take it, can’t take not being sure.

He reaches out a hand to stop him. He’d take Bucky’s left arm, but he doesn’t have one, so his hand winds up splayed across Bucky’s stomach.

Bucky stops in his tracks. Steve says, “Buck, wait.”

He doesn’t get an answer. Just Bucky standing there waiting, ready for his next command, and that’s what breaks Steve enough to say, “I don’t — you can’t just do whatever I say, be whatever I say, like it’s — like I’m —”

He chokes on the words. Bucky’s abs quiver under his touch, and when he turns his head, his gaze is cracked open, more vulnerable, more desperate than Steve’s maybe ever seen. “I _don’t know how to do this,_ ” he whispers.

“You don’t,” Steve tries, but Bucky says over him, “Fighting, and planning, I — but this, I’m not — I need you tell me how. I want.” He sucks in a breath, shuddering under the weight of it, and drops his head. His words seem to have run out.

“Okay,” breathes Steve, feeling tears sting his eyes, “okay,” and Bucky makes a punched-out sound, but his hand catches Steve’s when he goes to draw it away, and they stumble down together to the sea.

Steve stops Bucky one more time, knee-deep, to make _sure_ his stump of an arm can stand up to water exposure, but Bucky waves him off. There’s a soft curve to his mouth, like he finds Steve’s concern endearing, and he says, glancing down at Steve’s clothes, “You goin’ swimming in those?”

“They need washing,” says Steve. It’s not the whole truth; he also doesn’t want to pressure Bucky, doesn’t want to confront him too directly with what they used to be. “Two birds. You know what they say.”

When Bucky glances over at him, there’s a glint of unforced humor in his eyes. “Do they still say that?”

“Believe it or not, yes.” Steve grins. “I had Tony on for a while thinking we used to slingshot pigeons for dinner.”

Bucky laughs at that outright, head pitched back, hair falling clear of his face. Watching him, Steve thinks that he is as just as beautiful as he always was, for all that the shadows have made a home in the hollows of his face.

The sand is a long, smooth slope, so gentle as to be nearly imperceptible, and by the time they’re waist deep, the plane looks like a toy on the horizon. The water’s warm, but not too warm, swirling as they move through it and tugging lightly at the fabric of Steve’s pants. He’s not sure what signals them to stop, but they do at the same time, and then Bucky grins at him, actually grins, and takes a deep breath and slides over backward, submerging himself completely for a moment before surfacing, bobbing gently, to float on his back.

They haven’t been swimming together since before the war. Not like this — not for fun, neither of them plunging in to save the other’s life. Used to be, water was the great equalizer; Steve’s size didn’t matter quite as much with the ocean to buoy him up.

He’s possessed of a sudden urge to show off. He dives smoothly, twisting sideways to knife into the water, and kicks hard. When he resurfaces, he’s shot past Bucky, who turns over in the water, gives him a distinctly unimpressed look, and says, “Hey, way to be a better swimmer than the guy with only one arm.”

Steve bursts out laughing. When he’s done, Bucky’s closer, so he shakes his head vigorously, showering him with droplets from his hair like a wet dog. “Fuckin’ labrador,” Bucky says fondly, and lunges for him, catching Steve in a slippery headlock and dunking him again.

They stay in the water for hours, wrestling and laughing, or just drifting on their backs and watching the sky. Both their fingertips are wrinkled like prunes, skidding slick and sensitive over each other’s skin, when a momentary tussle, rolling in the water, runs them finally aground.

They’ve drifted closer to the shore, somehow. Steve’s knees hit sand, bumping him to a stop, and he’s leaning laughing over Bucky, who’s got himself propped up on his one arm, waves lapping his chest and hair wet and tangled, framing his face. He lifts his chin and just like that they’re kissing, mouths warm and yielding, tang of salt on Steve’s tongue.

Bucky makes a small sound in his throat, and then he’s wrapping his arm around Steve’s back, pulling him closer, trusting him with his entire weight. Steve braces them with his left hand and cups the back of Bucky’s head in his right, carding his fingers through wet hair, then trails them down Bucky’s back, still kissing him, to find the ridges of his scars. They’re ragged lines, knotted, imprecise; he traces them again and again, as if that could erase them, heal the long-ago pain. And Bucky sucks in a breath and floats off the sand entirely, like Steve is his new gravity. Like the planes of water and sun and sky are incidental, Saturn’s rings, spreading in endless spinning orbit around the singularity that is Bucky and Steve.

\---

They teach him new protocols, and new tongues. They train him and exercise him, men with clipboards watching. They tell him what to do about security cameras. About witnesses. They arm him, put him down and bring him up again, show him what he is and where he belongs.

They don’t hurt him. Not like that, anyway.

They bring him in bloody and battered, half-conscious, not sure how he’s conscious at all. They speak in furious Russian. He doesn’t understand. That’s bizarre, he thinks later, in a memory, or a dream — that he doesn’t understand.

They put him in the cold.

They don’t treat his injuries. That comes later, shivering and bone-hollowing pain, coming back to a four-years-broken body no one ever bothered to set right. Zola says things to him about medical triage, and fixing his spine, repairing his mutilated shoulder, doing something about the bubbling noise his lungs make and the endless sick pounding in his head. He’s frantic and terrified, and every motion hurts worse, but Zola straps him down and presses needles in his arms, and when the electric current comes surging through his skull, it’s a blessed relief.

He doesn’t remember forgetting. How do you remember forgetting? He remembers being too much, and feeling too much, and then feeling nothing at all.

\---

Steve isn’t sure about taking Bucky to raid the Raft. It terrifies him almost too much to breathe, putting him that close to people who’d lock him up forever — who’d shove him dead-eyed in a maximum-security cell and throw away the key. Or worse. He can’t discount the possibility that Helmut Zemo isn’t the only one who’s learned how to unleash the Winter Soldier.

T’Challa retrieved the red book from him, and passed it on to Steve rather than letting it fall into other hands. Steve hasn’t looked at it yet. He also hasn’t slept since before the fight at the airport, but Bucky hasn’t either, and he’s passed out now, the exertion and pain finally catching up to him, which means it’s Steve’s chance.

It’s not that he doesn’t want Bucky to know he’s reading it. He just doesn’t want Bucky’s eyes on him as he works.

He’s had Natasha teaching him Russian for the last two years, ever since the Winter Soldier saved his life and vanished without a trace. It’s slow going nonetheless, forcing himself not to sound out the unfamiliar words. He glances over at Bucky frequently, making sure he’s still asleep. His face looks younger, more relaxed; his hair, dry now from the salt water, has taken on a gentle wave.

The very first trigger word — _longing_ — makes Steve’s throat stop up. He has to get up and walk out of the jet, take long shuddering breaths down the length of the beach before he can turn back, by the light of the sunset, and open again to his place in the book.

When Bucky emerges later, blinking, Steve’s made a fire, and he’s sitting by it with the red book on his knee.

“I want to burn it,” he says. He can’t quite bring himself to look up at Bucky. He hates the thing in his hand; hates it violently, isn’t sure how long he can go on living in a world where it exists. “But I don’t want to take it away from you.”

Bucky is silent. Steve adds, “Not if — I know the memories are —”

He stops talking when Bucky reaches out to take the book. He stares at its cover, and Steve experiences a brief instant of panic — what if Bucky opens it to read, what if the words have the same effect, even though they’re only on the page — before Bucky rotates his wrist to release it without ceremony.

It falls in the fire. Flames lick at its cover, consuming, and the words curl into ash.

They talk through their options after that. Bucky listens to Steve’s concerns calmly, but in the end, the plan will only work with someone to pilot the jet.

Bucky in tactical mode is clear-eyed and focused. He outlines plans and contingencies, studies the diagram Steve’s drawn in the sand. By the time they’ve laid out entry and exit paths, meet points and backup plans, he’s outright grinning, alight with the work of planning a mission, and Steve can’t help but grin back.

Bucky gets quieter the closer they get to New York, though, and when they’re nearing Riker’s, he says, like he’s been weighing the words, “Steve — for everything that’s happened because of me _,_ what I’ve done —”

For a moment, Steve’s heart rabbits like it used to when he was a kid. He’s been afraid of this; Bucky’s going to offer to turn himself in, going to argue that it’s the only place he belongs, and Steve _can’t,_ he can’t let him go, not again, he needs to find a way to make Bucky see that, a way to say _I died without you, I meant to, I did it twice, please don’t ask me to face that again, please —_

But Bucky continues, “I just wanted to say —”

And warmth spreads through Steve’s limbs, because this is not an abandonment. It’s an apology.

“Save it, Buck,” he says. He’s buoyed by relief. He slides from the pilot’s chair, and Bucky replaces him automatically; they still move so easily together.

“I’ve told you,” adds Steve, “time and again — I’m with you ‘til the end of the line.” The Raft is in sight; it’s go time. Sam and Clint are in there, Wanda and Lang. He rests a hand on the switch for the door and adds, “Now I’ve got to save some friends who’ve done the same for me.”

\---

Bucky tries to kill himself exactly once.

It’s not after he’s the Winter Soldier. By then, he’s too far gone; by then, anything that’s Bucky Barnes is underwater and won’t resurface, not for a long time, not until that day on the bridge in DC. No, it’s in the isolation ward, long before that, hidden in a lab somewhere deep in the factory, with a bulb-headed scientist he’ll later learn is Arnim Zola piping something awful into his veins.

He doesn’t know what it is. They’re not torturing him for information. When they talk about him, what little he understands, they talk about making a weapon.

No one ever comes back from isolation. Bucky doesn’t know if that means they’re dead, or gone; he isn’t sure the two are quite the same.

No one ever comes back from isolation, and Bucky’s always been good with tactics. Protocols. So when he breaks his restraints, he already knows he has only minutes before the alarm sounds; he already knows there’s no chance he can fight his way free.

He raids the cabinets. There’s no cyanide; too bad. There are other things, though, things he knows and things he doesn’t, and some of them have warning labels, skulls and crossbones for acute toxicity, and he pours them all, choking and gagging, down his throat.

They find him in a pool of his own vomit, blinking hazily and sure he should be several times dead. He isn’t. They strap him back to the table, with twice the restraints. He’s burning. He’s hallucinating. He sees Steve by his bedside, pinched mouth and coltish limbs, griping about his latest 4F; he smiles and tries to touch him and tell him he’s _safe,_ he’s so glad he’s safe, but Bucky’s wrists are pinned down, and he can’t move.

It should have killed him. He’s sure it should have killed him. And that’s how he knows he’s halfway to a weapon already.

The hallucinations come and go. He mumbles his way through another protocol: name, rank, serial number. Name, rank, serial number, and then Steve is there again, only he’s different, _he’s_ the weapon now, the way they want Bucky to be. But somehow he’s still Steve, he’s taller but he’s still Steve, and Bucky’s pretty sure they weren’t ever going to let him still be Bucky.

He never tells Steve about the poison, even though it’s still making him wobbly and useless on their flight from the lab. _Just go, leave me,_ he wants to say, but he knows Steve, even this new Steve, and there isn’t any point.

He does tell him, eventually, about the serum. But that comes later.

What comes first is the march back to the camp, at the head of the liberated soldiers, triumphant. What comes first is watching Steve, floating on pride and relief but still honor-bound, turn himself over to the Army’s justice. What comes first is feeling his heart sink to the bottom of his shoes when Colonel Phillips says no.

Because Steve is in it, now. He’s gone and put himself in the middle of this war, and Bucky knows there’s no way short of death or victory he’ll ever get him out.

So he cheers and grins and leads the applause for Captain America, and puts away his anger for himself.

\---

They drop Lang and Barton off with their families, and Wanda in Scotland, to meet up with Vision; how they know to find each other there, Steve can’t say he entirely understands.

After that, he’s tempted to keep wandering around the globe for a while. Find another beach. Tell Sam to give them a few days. At least they’ve picked up some fresh clothes.

But Bucky gives him a look, and he knows it’s time.

T’Challa sends an escort to lead them into Wakanda. Even following them, Steve’s not sure he wouldn’t have pulled up the first time, convinced he was about to crash them all into the trees. But Bucky’s at the controls, and he makes the run in smoothly, sets them down on the landing pad with red-armored women to greet them and T’Challa waiting, dressed in black.

Later, in his office, he outlines the plan for Bucky. Deprogramming is delicate work; they want to remove the trigger words without interfering with the memories that carry them. _Longing,_ Steve thinks. _Homecoming. Daybreak._ To do it, they’ll need to put him under again; to build a model of his brain and tease out the ways to set it free.

Steve half expects Bucky to object — to refuse to give another person that power over him. He’s wrong. He can’t quite shake the notion that Bucky’s actually relieved to be sent back into cryo. That this last week has worn him thin, in more ways than one; that he’s too exposed, too himself, to stand much longer before something gives. There’s a weariness to the lines of his body, and a calm. Steve studies him as they sit in the anteroom of T’Challa’s office, waiting for him to finish a call.

Bucky’s got his head tilted back on the back of an armchair, staring at the ceiling. He says, “I wish I hadn’t lost my notebooks.”

Steve thinks back. He remembers dropping the notebook in the apartment; after that, he doesn’t know. “You had pictures of me in there.”

“Yeah, and other things. Doesn’t matter.” Bucky’s eyes catch on a bowl of fruit sitting on the table opposite them, bananas and passionfruit and mangos, and he smiles suddenly. “Hey, did you know they found a way to can orange juice that doesn’t suck?”

It startles Steve into a laugh. Orange juice concentrate; that’s one of the things SHIELD bought for him when they set him up in that first apartment in New York. His cabinets had been full of things like prunes and low-sodium saltines, and the girl who’d done his shopping had twisted her hands and admitted, _I bought the things my grandparents like, sir,_ and he’d finally worked out how to explain to her that as a supersoldier he suffered from neither constipation nor cardiac trouble, and that _no one_ liked low-sodium saltines.

The orange juice was all right, he’d thought. But he’d felt rather cheated when he first went to the grocery store himself and found bottles upon bottles of fresh-squeezed.

“It still kinda sucks,” he tells Bucky, honestly. “But God, you’re right, that shit they had us drink in the war was awful.”

“Hey. You coulda stayed home to eat real oranges. You brought that one on yourself.”

A memory strikes Steve suddenly; one he’s long forgotten. _Big ole mansion in Florida, or California._ “I never did get that orange farm.”

“Yeah,” says Bucky. “Yeah, I’d say things turned out a little different from how we thought.”

_I never thought,_ thinks Steve, and it strikes him suddenly that through all the pain, all the grief, he never did, not really; that the point of going to war was always to die in the war. _Men,_ he’d told Bucky, _laying down their lives,_ and that’s what he’d meant to do.

It was a sort of fearlessness he’d mastered at an early age. When you’ll get beat up no matter what you do, there’s no reason to see a bully and fail to pick a fight.

“I’ll be here,” he says, “when you wake up.”

“Yeah,” says Bucky again, slowly. He’s not looking at Steve. “Yeah, I might ask you not to be.”

Steve sits up fast, throat seizing on his words. “Buck —”

“Just until they get me sorted,” Bucky says quickly. He’s looking at Steve now, sitting forward in his chair, and he looks so apologetic, so ashamed, that Steve’s protests die in his throat. “Just — I gotta — you always fuck with my protocols.”

Steve’s eyes are stinging. “The whole point of this,” he says, “is that you don’t need to _have_ protocols. Not anymore.” His words feel like a lifeline, tossed into a suddenly raging sea. He’s not sure what he’ll do if Bucky throws it back.

But Bucky smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “Exactly.”

And Steve doesn’t understand, not really. But they were kids together in Brooklyn once, and he remembers, suddenly, that he had one thing, in those days, that was even more certain than a fight.

\---

They go to the recruitment center together, a few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but Bucky doesn’t enlist.

He tells Steve he does. He helps Steve train for it, even though he knows it’s useless; he feeds him optimistic lies. He’s training Steve for something else, really — for Bucky not being there — and they both know their days are a ticking clock. Steve’s full of starry idealism, a hard-edged joy that he’s found a sword he can die on, a way to spend his useless, precious life.

Bucky doesn’t enlist, but it doesn’t matter, really, he’s got his draft letter and no one to stop him from letting Steve think that he shares his dream. There’s an irrational, bottomless part of Bucky’s heart that believes it will be enough. That if Bucky lives out the story Steve wishes for himself, if he’s good enough and brave enough and dies a heroic enough death, somehow Steve will be satisfied. Somehow he won’t do anything stupid; somehow he won’t find a way to lay his own damn life on the line.

He doesn’t enlist, but he tells Steve he does, tells everyone he does. He laughs, several lifetimes later, to realize the lie made it all the way to the Smithsonian.

He’s stunned Steve never notices, with all his time up close and personal with Bucky’s dog tags. It’s right there in his serial number for anyone to see. Or maybe Steve _does_ notice and doesn’t care. Bucky wouldn’t put that past him. Steve always had a reckless, terrifying capacity to choose not to care; to place Bucky above everything, to place the Right Thing above everything, his own safety, his future, the world’s. It’s most of why he always needed looking after. The illness thing was only a part.

In the end, he’ll go to war more times than he can count — the man who was Bucky Barnes.

He doesn’t know that then, though, with the envelope burning in his jacket pocket, paper somehow fiery where it brushes his skin. He doesn’t know it then, in the mud and the cold of his foxhole, or then, at the bar of the Whip & Fiddle, raucous singing and the lively strut of the piano pounding in his ears. He doesn’t know there will ever be another war, that this one won’t wipe out all of humanity, history, time; he can’t possibly dream of them, tiny and insidious, wars he’ll carry in his own metal fist and set off like precision bombs, all around the world.

He knows so little, then. But he’ll think about that draft letter, later, and remember that of all the fights he’s ever been in — the ones he lost and won and started and ended and never did a goddamn thing in, the ones for good causes and bad ones and both and no cause at all — the only ones he ever _chose_ were the ones where he followed Steve.

\---

There’s something harsh in the fact that the first time Steve sees Bucky’s new arm in all its glory is the day he comes to bring him a fresh war.

It matters less than he thinks it will. Bucky’s hair is long and soft around his face, and he’s smiling, holding himself easily, for all that he’s dressed for killing once again. The arm is vibranium, and darker than his last one, gleaming with gold trim. It’s the color Steve liked, when they went over prototypes together.

They went over a lot of prototypes. Bucky had no interest in attaching an unknown quantity to his shoulder; by the time an exasperated Shuri sent the final design to production, Steve’s pretty sure Bucky could have manufactured it himself.

It’s lighter than his last one, less painful a weight to carry. It holds warmth, Steve knows. It senses touch and temperature, not merely spatial position and pain. It wraps around Steve’s ribs when he hugs him, and Steve knows Bucky can feel the way his chest expands as he breathes in the smell of Bucky’s shampoo. The way his heart beats faster at Bucky’s touch.

They’re in the middle of a nation readying itself for battle — a battle Steve brought to its doorstep — and there’s no time for them. No time for a quiet word or a kiss, never mind a retreat to Bucky’s home in the country. No time to strip each other down as the breeze plays unfettered through the window; to remember each other, and forget; to listen with half an ear through the sparrows’ chatter for the distant shouts on the hillside, stealing moments of reverence, watchful for the children’s return.

It doesn’t matter. He’ll take Bucky any way he can get him; any way that has him walking up on his own feet, with his own heart shining like a light behind his eyes.

“How you been, Buck,” Steve says as they pull apart.

Bucky smiles back at him. _We’re in it now, aren’t we,_ his eyes say, and _what alley did you wind up down this time,_ and _I got you, you punk. ‘Til the end of the line._

“Not bad,” he says out loud. “For the end of the world.”

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for attempted suicide (Bucky tries to kill himself while in Zola's lab).
> 
> A few research notes:
> 
>   * The idea for this fic wandered out of a completely non-fandom-related project that had me looking through a lot of early-20th-century classified ads for houses and apartments. I kept noticing how excited they were about fruit trees — it would always be a major selling point for a rental — and one woman on the street I was researching was locally famous for her successful indoor culture of orange and lemon trees. (A dive into the NYTimes archives found a [similar story](https://nyti.ms/2Krd6CF) about a cobbler on 54th Street whose tiny shop window was utterly filled with orange, lemon, avocado, date, and grapefruit trees.)
>   * The history of frozen orange juice is surprisingly interesting; you can read about it [here](http://time.com/4922457/wwii-orange-juice-history/).
>   * The notion of Bucky working as a translator in Bucharest is blatantly stolen from Rave's [The Name in the Mouth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11461458).
>   * I'm now slightly obsessed with the idea of Bucky spending time in Cuba. Someone who knows more than I do about Cuba should write this fic.
> 

> 
> By the way, thanks so much to everyone who poked me to write more Cap fic — your comments mean a lot. (Thanks also to those patiently waiting for SPN things. They're coming, I swear.) <3
> 
> ETA: I went and did the [tumblr thing](https://gravelghosts.tumblr.com/post/180246067064/mcu-fic-frozen-from-concentrate-stevebucky), if you want to reblog.


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